


What are we, if we’re not gods?

by goldtracing



Series: a veneer of normality [1]
Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Eldritch, Gen, Historical Hetalia, Immortality, Mythology References, Personification, Religious Imagery & Symbolism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-01
Updated: 2021-01-05
Packaged: 2021-03-10 02:01:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 8,709
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27756568
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goldtracing/pseuds/goldtracing
Summary: Nation and human, mortal and immortal – what exactly are they?Or; a short study of the nature of eldritch personifications.
Relationships: America & South Korea (Hetalia), Canada & England (Hetalia), China & England (Hetalia), Japan & South Korea (Hetalia), Rome & South Italy (Hetalia)
Series: a veneer of normality [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2061168
Comments: 9
Kudos: 42





	1. an apex of wonder…

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They have always held a touch of the divine, something godly and unnatural. Something that has aided them as well as hindered them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> With a new season of hetalia on the horizon and me seeing speculations and ruminations on the nature of these golems floating around again, I’ve decided to write this piece.

  


> I was old in those epochs uncounted  
>  When I, and I only, was vile – Nemisis, H.P.Lovecraft
> 
> * * *

What are they actually? Some days it is crystal clear. They are personifications of nations, the result of imagined communities banding together and distinguishing themselves from other collections. In a convoluted way, they are traditions and ideas made manifest, flesh and blood and bone mirroring the human body plan and a personality that is the result of a national identity being formed and evolving as time passes.

Other days it is more dubious; maybe because their mere existence is cheating, a breach of the laws of nature, and because in an age of science and technology, they themselves seek concrete answers. Myths and legends can only tell so much – even if they provide a grain of truth, the rest of reality is warped into a work of fiction.

Yet could the clues be found there, like in Israeli mythology with its golems? They were not actually creatures on second thought and that is why they are a good starting point. Dust to dust, ashes to ashes – all things end in reserve to how them began. It suits them perfectly – they came from nothing and return to nothing.

That assumption is better than labelling them human beings.

Their births are caused by the formation of a culture and as their civilization matures, they grow up. Death to them is a product of regression, a result of everything they’ve ever stood for turning to ash beneath their fingertips, their language being forgotten and their customs fading into obscurity.

Romano would say that out of all the children of Rome, he had been the only one to meet their father. Almost all of their kind could claim to have witnessed a fellow nation die, but how many could say the same of an empire?

From the very moment he had been shaken awake that fateful day he had been painfully aware that they had reached a crossroad. Intuition, sharp and acute, had cut to his very bones with a profound bittersweetness. Because endings are just new beginnings.

The smile Romano had woken up to had been a bitter sweet one, and at once he had known better than to ask why his sleep should already be disturbed at this early hours – the only indication of dawn had been a faint green smear on the horizon. That mundaneness had had a wonderful touch to it, amidst all the irony and chaos.

Maybe he had gotten up without compliant anyhow because of all the teaching’s Rome had instilled in him had seeped through. Maybe it was because his nonno had appeared worse for wear with a worrying tiredness infused in his every movement.

His state had been deteriorating over the past years, even decades. Despite that, the senate had been reassuring them that Julius would get better soon and that it was all just a phase, yet the weeks had ticked by this matters just going from bad to worse. Those lies had become more something with which they had convinced themselves that the impossible could be averted than anything else.

It was hopeless, like the mutterings of a child trying to convince themselves that everything is going to be alright while their whole world is reduced to shambles.

Deep down he had known that a corner stone of his reality was crumbling, even though he couldn’t fully wrap his head around the why. The knowledge had been deep-seated, nothing superficial that his child mind could easily understand. Still, laying aside the feeling of queasiness and dread, he had gone through the notion with the older personification – he compliantly eaten a sparse breakfast and washed and cleaned and had gone through the city, clutching a large hand while he eyed pass-byers suspiciously.

That day, they had given him much notice, the city drowning in a panic and everybody to on edge to pay attention to a very strange child. It had been a reality that his father had reflected, one that competed with jaded resignation as mortal and immortal remained together in a complicated paradox.

How could he not worry to see the once grand imperium become a shadow of a man? Mental fatigue had been all to obvious, and it had been impossible to ignore how his clothes had limply hung off a once powerful body, the way his thick crop of hair had thinned and how his skin, despite the bronzed colour had a sickly sheen to it.

All his questions had been rewarded with cryptic answers, all concerned looks with weary grins.

That day still had contained moments of normality, of safeness – as in saying morning prayers, and the manner Rome never ceased to impart titbits of wisdom.

Hours had been long drawn, as if god himself knew that the end had to be inspected in all its detail, trauma meticulously installed in people and memories seared into the mind with utter vividness. It had seemed like an eternity until the day had finally come to a close.

There had been no Senate gathering, no market to walk through and no circus performance to attend. The garrison had been deployed to the outskirts to fend off the invading barbarians; a hopeless endeavour in the end. There had been a sadness coursing through the Empire at how it all had fallen apart, one that he hadn’t even bothered to disguise.

As the sky had been painted crimson, they had stood up on the highest point of the city to overlook the carnage that had once been the nexus of power on this side of the globe. Bathed in the light of a dying day, Rome had let out a soft sigh before crumbling to dust.

“Nonno?”, Lovino had whispered mournfully and so he had been left alone with nothing but a purple toga and a burning city.

“So, he wasn’t a god, just a fool playing one”, Visgoth had sneered when the flames had died down, the treasuries had been looted and blood had mixed with ash. Once the barbarian had spoken in an entirely different tone – one of reverence and awe.

Somehow they are far more than the dust and mud they are always born from – sharp wit and glory aren’t attributes of a mere servant.

Even the most ordinary mortals had noticed the power Julius had radiated in his prime and they had whispered that he was a demigod, a proud son of Jupiter or Mars.

The legionaries that had fought along side him had told each other stories and anecdotes of a commander that could never be slain and over goblets of wine after victories, the tales had grown wild. They had speculated if he were actually a god destined to bring them glory and if golden ichor flowed in his veins in place of mortal blood.

Just has it had been with Greece, the myths of immortality and divinity eventually reached the upper echelons and became more outlandish with every passing year, being retold and reinvented during orgies and circus visits. It still didn’t prevent the shock politicians and scientists commonly experienced upon meeting their esteemed nation in the flesh. Youth and an astoundingly mortal guise ensured amazement on behalf of the humans and amusement on behalf of the personification.

Can it be that the assumption that they are deities isn’t so unrealistic?

No mortal weapon can dispatch them. They demand loyalty and the sacrifice of blood and life to sustain them for centuries. Like the Olympians, they are flawed and engage in frivolities and they feel emotions like any regular human. It is just the particularities that vary.

They can be benevolent or cruel, grant boons or rob a person of everything dear – a reason the higher-ups tend to cosy up to countries once they are in the know.

But gods can also fall; they can become arrogant and then those they once deemed their lesser can usurp them. Grandiosity isn’t an antidote to hubris.

China had payed a hefty price for his decadence. For ages he had been regarded as holy, an immortal that had descended from the heavenly peach orchids and the gardens of the gods to lecture the mortals about the high arts and guide them to prosperity

_Tea and paper and gunpowder._

For centuries he had been the middle kingdom, the well spring of civilization and the western powers hadn’t dared to rouse the great red dragon from his slumber. Arrogance had blinded him, and thus he had allowed himself to stagnate – as still water becomes stale and filled with decay, so had inaction sapped the vigour of his mind. He should have heeded Russia’s and India’s warnings that the European powers had set their sights on the East and were willing to bleed it dry. Everything is clearer in hindsight.

The price he had payed had been high.

Oh, how it had hurt to watch England idly climb up the steps of the Forbidden Palace, all leisure and self-confidence as if the place belonged to him, as if he were some sort of ethereal creature that was always in the right and therefore deserved to have the world handed over to him on a silver platter. China had once been inflected with the same overinflated ego.

The Westerner had quipped with a smirk on his accursed face: “So much so for being the son of the heavens. It was about high time that someone brought the dragon to his knees, eh?”

The older nation had stood back and watched as Arthur had dictated a new set of rules – a demeaning set of ones that had fastened a yoke around Yao’s neck – and how he had ferried jade and silk and porcelain away, unable to intervene as he was robbed.

He had reassured himself that that arrangement would only be temporary. Yao Wang had never survived by obsessively pondering on the what-ifs and in between opium induced dreams he had forged plans for the future. The sun would one day set on the British Empire.

Kirkland have grasped that he wasn’t immune to failure when he broke the tombs of the pharaohs opened. Then he should have realised that while titanomacy was the fashion nations rose and unseated the old and stale, that his power was bound to be transacted to another because of this very same principle. He would fall the same way many before him had, and somebody else would step up to fill that empty space.

China’s insides churched at the thought of England breaching those last resting places so shamelessly. Such disrespect for the dead should have never been tolerated. Of course, exploring on itself wasn’t an offense, handling it so casually and self-righteously was.

Kemet would have cried out in rage had she known that an insolent brat was stealing her treasures and relics and grounding up the mummies of her most profound people to use as pigment to paint scenes of glorified atrocities.

Such bitter irony that while funeral rites are a fundamental part of every society, yet nobody ever pays the last respects to a deceased nation. The remnants and ruins are unearthed for the living to gawk at and study and beyond that little is done to honour the past.

Had the Ancient gotten lost in the Underworld without a Book of the Dead to guide her? Had there even been enough left of her to do the journey? They never leave a tangible body behind, just a corpse in form of ruins and forgotten artifacts and faded memories strewn across the land.

Once she had been a high priestess of a religion that had worshipped her as well, because of course Ra would have designed the people of the Nil to be the mightiest. That had all be for nought, a dream that didn’t have fundaments in realty and was disproven. For hundreds of years only sand had swept through the temples of the sun god.

In the end she had been fussy, all to persistent that she would return to resplendency even as the ache in her bones murmured that she was living on borrowed time, even as Rome and Greece had helped her stand on weakened legs and prepared to carve out parts of her corpse for themselves.

Youthful looks can be so deceiving when a person is old on the inside.

There was little doubt that her heart would have weighed heavy against the feather of truth, and that Amit had gladly devoured a treat that she had been looking forward to for eons – the character of a nation. Their nature practically condemns them to vice because nations can never be saints, expect in their delusions.

Such aspects of her existence were something that India pondered on often, usually in the early morning hours when she remained unmoving in bed and couldn’t find any sleep. Sometimes it was the daily problems that kept her awake, other times the past with all its convolutions. Or she had no option to stay awake as her mind visits and revisits question, running through a never-ending maze in search of the answers.

There is blood on their hands and any throne is build upon putrefying corpses. But even the gods aren’t free of sin and still they are divine.

Maybe in a culture that was deeply entwined with the principle of karma, such things were simply more relevant. She knew that other nations were also sometimes haunted by guilt and plagued by past mistakes. She also knew that many of them were more inclined to wrap them up and shuffled them out of sight, keeping them under lock in key, as if pretending that their atrocities didn’t exist would make those lies become reality. They were just not so open to introspection as she was, Krishika told herself.

Inevitably, she still thought herself as a god incarnate, because how else could she be what she was? Wasn’t a person’s place in the world determined by their birth, and that by the deed done in the past life? Wasn’t the born to be great?

After centuries of submission, she could feel the power creeping back into her veins, the sun rising to warm chilled earth so that something new and wonderous could grow and sustain itself. The scars of colonial rule had begun to fade, and the marks of a new era had started to bloom. A sign that she wasn’t forsake, doomed to die wrapped in chains. Whether it was the thousand deities of Hinduism or the one god of Islam, she repented for her sins, and stepped into the sacred waters of the Ganges to wash her body and soul free of her crimes. India’s people were devout to their country and thus she was loyal to herself. 

Yet not all are convinced that they are in the wrong or that they should suffer retribution for their actions. Some are wholly convinced that the opposite is the case. For a few it come in form of an otherworldly transcendence in the eyes of humans.

Prussia was one such personification that had discovered that the grace of god came with prestige. Back in the day, it had been easy to write of his apparent invulnerability of a heavenly gift, and the humans gobbled it up. They wanted clarifications to what happened around them, and it was far easier to trace anything out of the ordinary either back to god or the devil than delve further into the sublime.

Besides, having the very ground you walk up worshiped has an exhilarating quality to it.

In those turbulent times, the expressions of shock that had quickly morphed into awe and reverence had been so delicious. Without the shadow of a doubt, they had been dumbstruck when they had first borne witness to Prussia coming out of the tent where he had been deposited. The young rascal had been dead merely an hour ago, his body cooling after a fatal stab wound had caused all vital organs to cease functioning. Yet there he had stood, alive as ever and only bloodied clothes being the testament to the mortal wound that had perfectly healed.

The first knight that had noticed that absurdity had stared at him with disbelief, his knees had buckled, and his mouth had moved but no sound had come out.

Gilbert had already calculated that such an entertaining scene was bound to occur. He was simply too reckless, and his men had been so devout, faith and fear of divine punishment flowing through their veins just as much as it had through his. Such was the recipe to cause miracles to happen in public.

It never really matters what happens, just how.

Prussia had offered his trademark smirk and had inquired: “Missed me?”

Those words had been saturated with arrogance, yet nothing else had suited the moment better. Upon that, the man had fallen into fervourish prayers, rocking back and forth on his knees as he had murmured the words aloud.

Others had soon come to see what all the commotion was about, and they too had cried out in joy and religious devotion. They had crowded around him, kissing the tattered hems of his clothing in the hope of thus being boon with long lives and prosperity, touching him as if he were a saint. Maybe he had always been exactly that; a second messiah, the salvation of mankind woven in flesh and blood and bone that would be spit asunder again and again and again in holy sacrifice. Wounds that would always heal because out of all of god’s creations, he was the purest.

Since being witnesses to that divine spectacle, his brothers in arms had looked at him with differently. They had claimed that the unsulliedness of his white hair could only be that of an angel and that his pale, unblemished skin made him befittingly ethereal. The scarlet of his irises was simply proof that he wasn’t human, rather something grand far beyond that, divinity distilled and compressed into the lean physique of a boy on the verge of adulthood.

After that, they had entered battle with all the more vigour, because they were convinced that they had the Almighty’s blessing amongst them. Such so that Gilbert could lie to himself that he was destined to be the Lord’s hand on earth, that he was without vice, yet that was just a crude fantasy.

However, that isn’t really surprising in conclusion due to the fact that religion is never really as morally upstanding as it paints itself to be. Because isn’t killing another in God’s name just murder. Hasn’t the clergy always feasted like kings while preaching humbleness? Isn’t faith a blindfold to block out reality, riddled with dogma as it is?

There had been nothing righteous in how Spain had missioned and baptized Inca as a Catholic only to tied him to a stake and burn him alive.

Maybe violence comes so naturally to them because they are something more sinister all together. Bloodthirstiness so naturally to people that lust for more, for people that view each other as aliens. It is a corner stone of their essence that some humans easily catch wind of. Mortals can be surprisingly astute, especially the younger ones with their untrimmed curiosity and zest for life – it is such a pity that they often interpret their findings incorrectly.

“Witch!”, they had sneered at him when he had passed them in the streets, when their intuition had told them that there was something else beneath that guise of a child.

“Demon”, they had murmured when he had snuck off into the woods to hunt with the Indians, and came back with torn and dirtied clothing. When he had remained healthy while other wilted away.

“Spawn of the devil”, they had mumbled when he had proved himself for too intelligent for his own good, outsmarting the adults at every other turn.

At its climax they had looked at him with faux-pity and glee as the court had found him guilty of witchcraft and communicating with Satan. They had chanted biblical phrase in order to hide their joy as he had been led up to the scaffold and hung. It hadn’t been the last time America had stuck his head through the noose, but it had certainly been his first.

In his dreams he still felt the rough rope around his neck, the dread of dying and the horror of the limbo that lay between worlds, when the past came creeping back up from where he had tucked it away.

Forever he would remember walking up in a ditch, so dreadfully cold and swathed in rags that hadn’t belonged to him. With stiff limbs and lungs that had had to relearn how to breath air, he had trudged down the silent streets to the courthouse. When he had mustered enough energy and courage to open the door, the people inside had gasped in disbelief.

For a moment there had been an eery silence as everybody had tried to comprehend what they were seeing. Then women had started shrieking, men had begun yelling, and a farmer drew a knife. Coming back to his wits, the revertant had stepped forward, aghast at what had come crawling back from the grave.

Alfred could have sworn he had heard the pastor mumble under his breath: “You’re so corrupted that not even the devil accepts you.”

“Begone, malicious spirit! May the power of Christ compel you!”, she man had then commanded in an authoritive tone that had made the crowd behind him fall silent. Intrigued they had watched with bated breath as the priest had wafted some smoke of frankincense his way. The personifications sole answer to having such a thing shoved in his face had been to sneeze and grant the offender a sour look of the calibre only a 10-year old can muster.

Yet such negative associations aren’t always to their disadvantage. Fear can be a very useful weapon, after all. The power that comes with it is tangy sweet and somehow it still tastes like ash. And it is so addictive.

It was undeniable that Japan had once been a formidable empire, one that had been forged on plastic steel and pride and the soul-twisting desire to be in absolute control. The desire for innovation and the conviction that he was right and everybody else ought to cower before him had sown the seeds for suffering. Honour before life; it was a mantra that had led to the most brutal wars that had ever been waged.

Kiku had always been pensive and calm, as still as an undisturbed pound and in possession of a unique self-discipline. Stranger had often taken it as affirmation that he was harmless; but press a weapon in his hand and he was suddenly no longer a man. Forth came a warlord, concern with slitting the throats of his enemies in a clean, precise line. In his stead, a wolf emerged that couldn’t wait to sink his teeth his prey and methodically tear it apart.

When Japan had swept across the land in a violent storm his reputation had preceded him. At night, women and men alike had told one another stories of a demon fighting on the side of their enemy, fear clogging their throats at the thought of him, causing the words to come out crippled and soaked with despair. How could such a creature be human. The Japanese truly had to be monsters to let such a thing fight in their ranks.

He couldn’t really blame them; in the grand scheme of things, accepting death so casually is unnatural. One is expected to fight it, to spare others from falling into its grasp, not great it with open arms and kill others to pay tribute to it. Death as a centre point of life had long been part of the islands culture and thus part of Kiku Honda.

Tales of him being a oni or kitsune had spread, a yokai that would feast on the souls of the dying and the living. The stories had only increased with each passing victory as he had gained strength. Even his own people had given him a wide berth at one point, afraid that he would sap their life force if they came too close.

Over time, the myths and fables and tales wounded into the modern in urban legends and comic book stories; strange how humans translate fiction into reality and vis versa.

“That is Captain America for you”, Roosevelt had once joked to one of his generals at the end of a long meeting. The military man had barked out a harsh laugh, grinning as he had agreed:

“Sure thing, Mr President. That young bastard really is the golden boy of the army.”

Any other time Alfred would have barraged back into the meeting room and intruded in on the exchange, affirming the statement with grand words and declaring his greatness in such an uncouth way that it would have been egoistic. On that day, however, he had just smiled as he had excused himself and galivanted out the door.

Seeing that they had hauled him across the Atlantic and away from the front for a damn strategy meeting, they had ought to give him all the credit he had deserved, not to mention sing their praises about him to the high heavens.

A leader should pay respect to his nation, especially considering the heroics said nation has done.

Unbeknownst to the general, Alfred F. Jones had already been more a super-hero than any other man could ever be.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That took a damn long time to write. As you shall have noticed, there are countless references to history and mythology here. I’ll be posting a whole chapter on them when I upload the second part, because they are simply to many to casually shuffle away into the Author Notes.


	2. …that no reason can explain

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Their unexplainable nature hasn’t prevented people from trying to explain it, or hindered them from pondering their own existence.

> But the quintessential idea of Lovecraft's views was fear of the unknown, of the incomprehensible, of what mankind was not and was never meant to behold. And no matter how many eons mankind was gifted to advance, no matter what hyper-evolved super-society they may have eventually metamorphosed into, they never would have been able to understand a being as immeasurable as the stars themselves, whose great, eldritch mind was vast enough to encompass the whole of mankind's existence in a single vacuole of its thought.
> 
> — The City of Never

Through while magic and explanation of divine blessing are grandiose and convenient ways to explain their existence, it isn’t enough. Not even for them, for whom claims of the metaphysical carry the most benefits – the mystery that is an idea cloaked in flesh is too intriguing not to explore.

With the rise of science and the diminishing of all the religious enthusiasm of mediaeval times, Venice had found himself in a sticky position when the Renaissance arose. Before the revival of the old arts and the enhanced encouragement of human curiosity, it had been so easy to deem himself holy, a sign that the city had the Almighty’s patronage. His bishops had always dotted in him, coveted to him – because in their eyes, he was the bridge between the mundane and the scarred. They all wanted to be in god’s favour; they all wanted to reside in the Garden of Eden once they passed through the veil.

For that, they played polite once they discovered what he was and what he represented, too afraid to anger him and call him an abomination of hell, too prideful to outright prostrate themselves in front of him and kiss his feet. Mostly, them restricted themselves to granted him expensive gifts, lavishing him with honeyed words and pressing their lips to his signet rings.

Then humans started to shake free from the senseless restrictions of feudalism and knightly chivalry and the overloads of religious dogma. His people had started t ask questions that had rattled at previously established world views.

That, on itself, wasn’t a thing that Feliciano could ever condemn, nor would he have tried to – the advancement of him as a nation was something he could only endorse. What he could condemn however, was when he was subject to relentless questions and when he was placed under extreme scrutiny, because all the former explanations of his being weren’t satisfactory anymore.

Those that knew that his human flesh and skin contained the sublime, the intangible made tangible, would look upon him in awe and ask him:

_“How can you even exist?”_

_“I don’t know”,_ was the answer more often than not, the best and most truthful one he could come up at times.

Sure, innately he had always been aware he was a national identity made manifest, a concept wrapped in flesh that spoke with a human mouth and saw with human eyes. Unlike a mortal, however, he couldn’t say whence he had come from, nor could he name his parents. Venizanio didn’t know if it was one nation, or two or three or four that had breathed life into him.

Upon questions on how he functioned, he found himself floundering. His subconscious contained the low roar of the thousands of lives he consisted of, their births and their deaths, their victories and defeats. Due to this, he was more intimately connected with those he consisted of than even humans amongst themselves. Yet he couldn’t be more separate from them, with his eyes that were too old and his mind that knew far too much. And he hadn’t been able to explain how that all was suppose to fit in with the harmony that laws of nature dictated.

Grasping at comet trails of plausible answers, he was helpless as they spend away before his mind could transcribe them into words. All that always remained was a vague feeling that allowed him to broadly discern right from wrong in face of all the probing inquiries.

Over the course of a century many people from all works of life came to him in their quest for knowledge, about the world as well as him. The historians badgered him about Rome and Greece, and other times long gone. The doctors interrogated him about a whole array of maladies – in the more ambitious he often witnessed a hungry glint, as if they wanted nothing for than to vivisect him. Artists and politicians came to him for advice and he humoured them all as much as his motivation and skills allowed him.

For it was also in the nature of personification to master many arts over the span of decades and be versed in multiple disciplines – and to finally share all their findings. Curiosity and the centuries they dwelled in this plane of existence didn’t allow for any other outcome.

And wasn’t t their obligation to tend to the people they originated from, as a gardener tends to their garden? Wasn’t it in their self interest to push the wheel of progress forward and prune the world of dead weight?

Temptation had often plagued him, the temptation to forsake the need for secrecy and directly contribute to his own welfare, whether through a stern hand in politics or making discoveries of his own and proudly parading them under his name, unchanged through eras. Yet that fantasy remained unrealised, one that he was only allowed to entertain. Instead, he had to endure gruelling confrontations, littered with innuendos and cryptic clues and references in the hope that a short-lived mortal would do all the work for him. He had to deal with all the stupidity and narrow-mindedness of people that hadn’t live through what he had lived through, that were so entrenched in their own superiority and the conviction that they alone were right even when the truth pranced around right in front of their noses.

The consequences of uncovering the realities of his true nature for all the public to see, for it to spread beyond the small circle which he could control, would have been catastrophic. Either the mortals would have worshiped him, or they would have subjected him to extreme torture to purge the world of his evil. With mentalities altering, it would have most likely been the latter.

Or they would have done so not to erase him, but rather to unlock the secrets of the universe as Korea had once unfortunately discovered.

It had been during the Second World War that the tragedy had unfolded. At the time, he had been under Japan’s jurisdiction and the latter had been very unkind. Such were the dynamics of conqueror and the conquered, that blood was repeatedly demanded from one side. And how much it had been.

Yong Soo had been sent to one of the infamous camps after a minor transgression against a lowly administrator. There he had been shot at point blank range only to return back from the limbo while other inmates had buried him, rudely shovelling dirt in his face as they did so. That had been the starting point of nightmare far more oppressive than anything he had ever experienced before. From then to this very day, he still had nightmares of how the eyes of those scientists had lit up at the prospect of studying an immortal, or what they had seen as such.

A few of them had known of Kiku, that much he had gathered, and they had known that their own nation was out of limits. However, they didn’t have those same qualms with a foreign country. So, they finally had a subject to enacting their brutal fantasies on with Yong Soo. Having Korea in their custody had been a dream come true for them and they had happily indulged their insatiable curiosity. 

On dark days when the past came back to haunt him and the present was rancid and unbearable like milk gone bad, he would find himself drowning in that maelstrom of horrors. Yong Soo would then reminisce on how the liquids they had pumped in his veins had burned and had nearly driven him mad. How the pills they had forced him to swallow had made his insides convulse and how they had granted him the sensation of his organs turning to mush.

The monsters in the guises of benevolent humans had stared at him with wide eyes and had asked him:

_“How can you even exist?”_

_“I don’t know”,_ had been the default reply, the bitter truth they had only accepted after weeks of experiments and torture. They had made incisions all over his body, drained blood and thrown back the flaps of skin and tissue to examine his entails, as if they could have discovered why such a deviation from the laws of nature was possible that way. Sourly it had reminded him of what he had heard of Rome’s soothsayers from China, that they had slaughtered animals and read the future from the condition of the intestines.

What glory and ruin had those bastards decoded from his insides?

Amazed they had observed and documented how the muscles and membrane had stitched itself seamlessly back together. And for all the medical torture he had been subjugated to, he’d never be able to forgive Japan as a person for what he happened in conclusion.

It wasn’t essential that he played meek anymore, not after he had done so for good a thousand years. For all that he had had to ensure, it was self-evident for him to harbour hatred.

Clearly he remembered the day Kiku had come to retrieve him. It had caused havoc when he had suddenly gone “missing” because you can’t occupy a nation without the personification in your grasp – a symbol of dominance and the insurance that the nation avatar couldn’t gather forces. They had need him in a sanctioned and surveyed place, where he could function both as a lackey and a captive.

Japan was too astute to not to have known the horrors his scientists had inflicted upon Korea, yet too self-centred to concretely care about his subordinates wellbeing. The inquiry about his pathetic state had been flimsy and void of any actual and genuine good intentions. The peninsular nation could have sworn that a smile had teased the empire’s mouth when he had spotted the traces of trauma and had glimpsed the fear he had exhibited.

Bitterness had been sowed as a result of that, the roots going deep and being watered by the refusal to apologize for all those atrocities.

Unknown to him, Japan had gone ahead and confiscated the condemning material, all the papers and negatives documenting the gruesome experiments and their findings. Photos and protocols that made even his stomach tie itself up in knots and caused in to shake his head in disgust – only mortals could be so bloodthirsty.

What did that make him?

During restless nights in solitude, he had poured over them and had sifted them through for weaknesses in his kind that he would be able to exploit. Afterwards he had always stored them away where nobody except he could find them. Mortals didn’t deserve to understand the workings of the immortals, those were secrets that they were in no way entitled to, nor could they be trusted with them. Less than the other personifications, even.

The last place he had stowed them away had been in a hidden compartment in an ornate desk, a desk that had been shattered to unimpressionable splitters and the paper and polaroids being disintegrated to fine ash, when a bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima one fine August morning.

When America had come and had been filled in about the experiments from the test subject himself, the Westerner had made sure to interrogate Kiku about his discoveries. As the boy king to whom the world was his oyster, the fledging superpower had seen it as his right to know of such things.

Korea had been lucky that the secrets of his kind had been destroyed and that Kiku had done all he could to dance around the topic, to deny knowing and keep his lips sealed, to give over all those memories to the tides of forgetting.

He had been lucky that it had been taken so swiftly out of mortal hands. Humans are often too curious for there own good, proceeding to uncover mysteries in clueless haste, so instant on skipping a few steps of the process instead of taking matters slowly and therefor thoroughly.

Furthermore, people are so frightened of that which them perceive as more powerful than them. Such entities are potential threats that could turn against them and eradicate or enslave them. That is why the nations have to keep their deep-rooted paradoxes shrouded in mystery. Mostly, they succeeded in that.

Ivan Bragvinski hadn’t had that sort of luck. In hindsight, he guessed it had always been bound to happen in one form or another. Because there wasn’t a more acute seismograph for the attitudes and leanings of a country than the literal embodiment of it. Keenly they had observed him, had studied him, and had reported everyone of his movements back to the powers that be.

Over the course of centuries, the nation had gotten used to the shadows that trailed after him and being confront by his rulers with all the paranoid questions they loved to pose. What he hadn’t been accustomed to was waking up in the middle of the night with a terrified assassin in the corner of his bedroom, the thin ray of moonlight seeping through the curtains making the blood on the steel blade shine.

Russia had been groggy upon awaking, haunted by the unusual sensation that he had just been roused from a gloomy dream, rather than from the limbo. The dull ache in his throat that had been the only residue of the freshly healed wound had only served to confirm his half-conscious suspicions.

Shakily, the man in the corner had asked: _“How can you even exist?”_

 _“I don’t know”,_ had been the slurred answer, because Bragvinski had had even patience to deal with the pesky agent and his fears.

How had had it even come to this?

Ivan had been quick to do all the necessary detective work. Quickly he had been surprised and frightened of how much he had gotten used to have his privacy curtailed and had therefore shrugged of all the omens of a destructive storm brewing – he certainly hadn’t expected things to spiral out of control as they had.

Because those not in the know about one of the greatest enigmas in human history had started to become curious. Like many before them, they had determined that there was something fundamentally alien and extraordinary out the man that named himself Ivan Bragvinski. To them, to that group of ruthless and decisive individuals, he hadn’t made sense.

He always had seemed bigger than the constraints of mortal fleshed allowed; more intense as well, like a snowstorm trapped in a glass bottle. He always appeared from nowhere in a new town, built up a new life from scratch in an eery, practised fashion and only betraying precious little of his history in the few years he lived in a place. Then he vanished and popped up somewhere else. Thus, the cycle repeated itself, again and again, undisturbed as he lived out one life after the other.

Then, some people that just had too much time on their hands had to go snooping around in his affairs, something wholly detrimental. Those people were supposed to know nothing about him yet craved to know everything. They had watched him like a cat watches a sparrow before it pounces.

Over time and through thorough research, they had collected puzzle pieces, evidence mortality was just an elaborate hoax in his case – they had gathered testimonies of people describing the cloying familiarity he exuded, even when a person had only met in once in the span of a lifetime. How he was intense even by Russian standards, whole worlds compressed into so little. Further evidence had been hard to come by, but nevertheless, the photos of Ivan with the freshy wed Czar and Czarina had landed in the wrong hands. Along with finger prints dating back to the turn of the century, before the World Wars, as well as journal entries of nobles and artists and clergy and diplomates over the span of a millennia, all culminating to paint of multifaceted picture of him.

As to be expected, when mortals didn’t lionize and laud him, they panicked upon piecing together the truth. In this century of socialism, there had been no Orthodox Church to explain his unnaturalness as an extension of god. There was no royal family that had latched on to him in something between symbiose and parasitism, that watched over him because their power was dependant on his approval.

Yes, the party had kept a close eye on him because his moods and ideas were commonly proportional to those of the general populace. Yet they had leaned back and twiddled their thumbs when a group of people had lashed out against the personification in a pre-emptive strike.

The sour looks he had reaped when he had dumped the evidence – bloody bedsheets and nightclothes along with a fidgety hitman – had been more directed at him than anything else. Being confronted by their negligence and fake virtuousness tends to invoke feelings of anger and distraught in humans, like how a shapeshifter is disgruntled upon being revealed.

Nevertheless, there are cases where the experiences aren’t so negative, where they actually have the opportunity to learn something about themselves.

As it had happened to Norway once, when a young lady in a white lab coat had marched up to him with a weary, if very intrigued expression on her young face and had asked:

_“How can you even exist?”_

_“I don’t know”,_ had been the reply because while he had been befuddled at first about what the woman had meant, his ignorance had quickly been replaced by understanding of the dilemma.

The whole situation had caught him by surprise, especially when the aspiring scientist had led him away into a laboratory and had shown him all the tests her team had conducted and the digital images them had assembled. Analyses and charts and 3D models had been presented to him and he had been as shocked as them upon going through all of them.

In afterthought, he had had it coming for him. It had been the first time he had had to give a sample of his genetic material in lieu of a criminal investigation, the first time anybody had ever tried to solve the mysteries of his genome. As far as he had known, it had been the first time to genetic material of his kind had been studied at all.

It had been a mistake on his behalf to assume that his DNA would reassemble that of an ordinary human because all evidence confirmed that there weren’t any neat double helixes in his cells. Rather there was a whole array of chemicals beyond adenine and guanine, cytosine and thymine. They had all twisted and turned to form the most unusual shapes under the electronic microscope, even though they had been outside of his body.

Like radioactive isotopes, they had continued to collapse in themselves but then time had been rewinded and reformed, with the molecules resurrecting themselves into new structures as they had defied entropy.

Many intrigued glances from the members of the criminal investigation department had been shot his way as a result, and he had jokingly said that this was evidence that he surely wasn’t the man they were looking for.

The event had been followed by a lot of red tape and bureaucracy as those that had made the discoveries had been given compact explanations along with instructions to keep their mouths shut. All evidence of Lukas’ inhumanness had been confiscated, and the “hush-hush” department, as he liked to call it, had done a good job of confusing people and leaving behind a lot of hush money.

He had gone out of his way to invite the young lady out for a drink as a form of apology.

In the end. It is a universal rule, that when the shackles of religious dogma and superstition are torn down that something must unavoidably step forth to fill the gap. As Canada had once discovered, one late afternoon in the Victorian era, when Charles Darwin, had visited England for a lengthy discussion over a cup of tea.

When the former had emerged from the drawing room, hands slightly shaking and his brows furrowed as his brain had worked to digest all the new information, Matthew had pitied him. Darwin had made his theory without taking them into consideration – not out of malice, but rather due to well-meaning ignorance. Having the revelation that something existed that defied the known rules was something that caused even the daftest of people to sink in shock.

After having been coped up in a room with a sharp-tongued empire, the explorer had given the colony the weary look of a man you had suffered a few verbal lashings. Whether they had been intentional or unintentional was a different story all together. Arthur was somebody that was rough around the edges, careless about how much his words stung as he had deconstructed the scientist’s believes while affirming other.

 _“How can you even exist?”,_ Darwin had asked Canada as the latter had handed him his coat and hat. On that one, Matthew hadn’t offered any of the wild speculations as his Father had nor that he presented any of the vague romantic waxings his Papa would have.

Instead, he had answered briefly and truly: _“I don’t know.”_

Because who does? Maybe one day they’ll have a plausible explanation.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, there we have it all. I really enjoyed writing this. And researching this. You guys can find all the historical info on the next page. 


	3. Background infromation

#  **an apex of wonder…**

  1. The Roman Empire went down when the Huns attacked from the east, causing many of the Gothic tribes to turn to Rome for help. However, Rome had a lot of problems of its own, particularly military issues that caused it the start to collapse within. Besides, they didn’t have the resources to take in so many people in such a short time frame.



  1. But the Goths weren’t content with this answer and also were very desperate. There also many other factors came into play, which I won’t mention here, that cause all those tribes to invade the Western Roman Empire and thus cause its fall.



  1. The gods in both Roman and Greek mythology didn’t have normal blood in their veins. Instead, they had ichor, the golden blood of the immortals. Also noteworthy is that they both depicted the Olympians as flawed, even human in a way.



  1. China long regarded itself as the middle kingdom (a common trend of countries) and having the blessing of the heavens. The Emperor was regarded as divine which isn’t a surprise because many rulers saw themselves as such as well as being a bit of a surprise because China was never so steeped in



  1. Because of this factor of arrogance, China grew decant and when the West started to make progress in leaps and bounds, it didn’t race to catch up at first. This culminated in bitter loses and unfair treaties from the mid-19th century to the mid-20th These hundred or so years are known of the century of humiliation in China.



  1. Egyptology only became a field of study after Napoleon Bonapart payed a visit to Egypt with a team of scientists and a lot of military men. During the Victorian era, it was a popular topic and with a lot of research being done there. A disgusting fact is, that mummy were ground up to make paint, namely mummy brown.



  1. Kemat is the name the Ancient Egyptian used for their country



  1. Every mummified person got a copy of the Book of the Dead when they were laid to rest. They apparently needed this book so that they could navigate the Underworld. They also believed that in order to enter the afterlife, you had to have your body intact, hence the mummification.



  1. The clergy was highly regarded in Kemet, being just a level below the pharaoh in the social hierarchy.



  1. Towards the end of its existence, Ancient Egypt was mainly kept alive by Greece and Rome. Although, many of the tradition of the nation had already been long lost when Cleopatra ascended the throne. By the way, Cleopatra was actually of Greek lineage.



  1. Amit was the monster that was present for every judging of a person’s soul in Egyptian mythology. If the heart was heavier than the feather of truth then she would devour the heart and the person would cease the exist altogether.



  1. Prussia was largely founded by the Knight Templars, a group of knights that healed the sick, protected travellers and converted people to Christianity. Gilbert making up from the dead would actually fit in their picture.



  1. Touching the skin or kissing the hem of a saint’s or king’s clothing was thought to grant luck in medieval Europe.



  1. Yes, the Conquistadors forced the last Inca king into being baptized, telling him they would spear his life if he did. But they went against their word. Immediately after being baptized, the king was put on a stick and burned to death.



  1. The Salem witch trails weren’t as much about religion as many belief. Rather, it was about religion being weaponized to achieve political and personal goals after a freak accident. No doubt Alfred would have also fallen victim.



  1. On the topic of witch trails – a lot of that stuff was simply made up. The Bible doesn’t long passages concerning the topic.



#  **…that no reason can explain**

  1. The Renaissance was regarded as the Age of Enlightenment. Never before had so much progress been made in the fields of art, architecture, literature, politics, technology, science, music and mathematics been made in such a sort time before the 20th



  1. During the Second World War, the Japanese Army used a lot of POWs as experimental guinea pigs for elaborate human experimentation. Now also consider that a lot of their knowledge was used to get to where we are today. On that note, a lot of countries did human experimentation in the 20th century, even on their own citizens.



  1. Russia has a very long history as spying on its own citizens, dating back to the Ochrana (a secret service) in czarist times.




End file.
